“Personal.” Tommy plucked out his lower lip and dropped in a wedge of Skoal Wintergreen. “Didn’t know that word was in your lexicon. You threw in an adverb and everything.”
Evan could count the people he trusted on the fingers of Tommy’s mutilated hand, with digits to spare. Since the Black Hawk’s disintegration, Tommy was one of the few remaining. Even so, Evan and Tommy knew nothing of each other’s personal lives. In fact, they knew little of their respective professional lives either. From the occasional dropped tidbit, Evan had put together that Tommy was a world-class sniper and that he did contract training and weapons R&D for government-sanctioned black-ops groups that were not as dark a shade of black as the Orphan Program.
Tommy supplied Evan with his firepower, too, and made each of Evan’s pistols from scratch, machining out a solid-aluminum forging of a pistol frame that had never been stamped with a serial number—a ghost gun. Then he simply fitted a fire-control group and loaded up the pistol with high-profile Straight Eight sights, an extended barrel threaded to receive a suppressor, and an ambidextrous thumb safety, since Evan preferred to shoot southpaw. He ordered all his pistols in matte black so they could vanish into shadows as readily as he did.
As Evan entered the heart of the lair, Tommy used a boot to shove himself away from a crate of rocket-propelled grenades, conveying himself over to a workbench where he at last creakily found his feet.
Laid out on a grease-stained silicone cloth were a laptop and a narrow pistol that looked like one of Evan’s 1911s that had gone on a diet.
“I skinny-minnied this little lady up for you,” Tommy said. “What do you think?”
Evan picked it up. It fit oddly in his grip. His usual pistol, sliced in half. It was barely wider than the 230-grain Speer Gold Dot hollow points it fired. He turned it over in his hand and then back. “The weight’ll take some adjusting to.”
“That’s your way of saying, ‘Thank you, brother. You’re PFM. Pure Fucking Magic.’”
Evan eyed the sights. “That, too.”
Tommy slung an altered holster across the workbench. “And here’s a special-sauce high-guard Kydex to fit it.”
Evan hefted the weapon a few more times. “To be honest, I wasn’t sure how you’d pull it off.”
“Pull it off?” Tommy’s head drew back haughtily. “Boy, I’ve been calibrating a laser gun for the navy that can knock drones out of the sky. I’ve been field-testing self-guided fifty-cal sniper rounds for DARPA that change direction in midair. Fine-tuned a smart scope that doesn’t let you shoot a friendly target.” He crossed his arms. “I think I can handle smuggling a handgun past a few mouth-breathing TSA agents.” He snapped his fingers, pointed to a sticky coffeepot gurgling behind Evan. “Fetch.”
Evan poured a mug for Tommy, had to wipe his hands on the gun-cleaning cloth. Tommy slurped the coffee across his packed lower lip. Then he lit up another Camel. Evan figured the only reason Tommy didn’t smoke them two at a time was that it hadn’t occurred to him yet.
Tommy pulled three Wilson eight-rounders from his bulging shirt pocket and offered them up. “Test-drive it.”
Evan slotted in the first mag, put on eye and ear pro, and walked to the test-firing tube. He ran through all twenty-four rounds without a hitch. Then gave a faint nod.
He came back over to the workbench. “How’s the A-fib coming?”
Tommy waved him off. “I’m getting extra beats in between my extra beats. I figure I speed shit up enough, I’ll go full-tilt Iron Man.” He jabbed the stub of his missing finger at the arrayed items. “Let me break it down Barney style. Same everything you’re used to but skinnier. ‘Why skinnier, Chief Stojack?’ you may ask.” The finger stub circled. “Witness.”
Tommy took the skinny gun and slid it into the laptop’s hard-drive slot where some hidden mechanism received it. “All they’ll see on the X-ray is the solid block of the hard drive. I had to go thirteen-inch screen on the laptop to make the specs fit, so they might make you take it out, power it up, all that security Kabuki-theater bullshit, but you’ll be GTG. Obviously you gotta clean the piece so there’s no residues that’ll ring the cherries in a puff test. As for the laptop, I filled it with bullshit spreadsheets, generic documents, a few stock photos.” He picked up the laptop, showed off its slender profile. “High speed, low drag.” He made a production of handing it off to Evan, a waiter displaying the Bordeaux. “Go forth and conquer.” He gave his gap-toothed smile. “Fair winds and following seas.”
Evan took the laptop and started for the door.
“Hey.”
Evan turned back.
“You’re not exactly a barrel of belly laughs generally, but you seem decidedly more somber. This ‘highly personal’? It’s actually highly personal?”
“Yes.”
Tommy studied him, tugging at one end of his horseshoe mustache. The crinkles around his eyes deepened with concern. “You get in a jam, send up a smoke signal. I’m not too old to cover your six, you know.”
“I know. But it’s something I have to handle alone.”
Tommy nodded slowly, his gaze not leaving Evan’s face. “Remember what Confucius say: ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’”
“Oh,” Evan said, “I’m gonna dig a lot more than that.”
8
Serve with Gladness
It had all been for shit.
Evan stood in front of his rented Impala on the side of Peachoid Road, staring at the street’s namesake, which he had grown to despise. He held the giant fruit monstrosity personally responsible for the stagnation of his pursuit.
He didn’t know precisely what he was looking for, but some indication that Jack and a ten-ton Black Hawk helicopter had struck the earth in this vicinity would have been a start.
Van Sciver’s Orphans were a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream. Not just at killing—they were good at killing, very good, but humans had been killing one another for a very long time. No, this is what they did best—erased any trace of their actions from the official world everyone else lived in. Nothing for the media, local PD, FBI, even CIA to grab hold of. They moved with the fury of a hurricane and didn’t leave a dewdrop in their wake.
Evan had driven the frontage and access roads, carved through the checkerboard plots of farmland, housing, and forest surround ing the novelty landmark, searching for that dewdrop to no avail. There was no wreckage, no scorched earth, no Jack’s truck abandoned at the side of a road.
The flight from Las Vegas, with a layover in Houston, had taken seven hours and seven minutes. Driving fifty-three miles from Charlotte Douglas International had tacked on another hour and twenty. A long way to come for a whole lot of nothing.
They say that revenge is a dish best served cold, but Evan preferred to serve it piping hot.
He took in a deep breath and a lungful of car exhaust.
The Fourth Commandment: Never make it personal.
He repeated it over and over in his head until he almost believed it.
Then he got into his Impala and drove off. He took a final loop upslope, winding through thickening forest that coaxed a distant memory of the trees surrounding Jack’s farmhouse.
He checked his RoamZone. Even after a long day, the high-power lithium-ion battery kept the phone’s charge nearly full. He wondered briefly what he would do if the next Nowhere Man case rang through—a real Nowhere Man case as opposed to the personal mission he was on now. After he helped his clients, he asked them to find one—and only one—person who needed his help and to pass on his untraceable number.
He had a rule, encoded in the Seventh Commandment: One mission at a time.
For Jack he was willing to make an exception.